Tim Brough's Black Leather Bookshelf

When Boomtown goes to Bust
5 Out Of 5 Stars

David Baerwald had had enough of your s#-t and was going to make sure you knew it. "Triage" is a cynical masterwork, his best album, and one to get angry about. It may have been released in 1992, chronicling the mess that was the Reagan administration, the rise of AIDS, the fall of the middle class, sometimes all in one song. Inciteful (not a typo) and musically beautiful, "Triage" may have been too overwhelming for the times. But oddly enough, that anger still feels relevant today.

Starting of with the cinematic 8 minutes of "A Secret Silken World," in which he asks "Don't you love to hurt the weak when they refuse to fight?" then details a rich person's complaints about being out and about in Beverly Glen on a "lazy kind of night" ("all those hungry people, such a drag. Let's get something to eat"). Sound familiar? As I write this, it's 28 years after Live Aid and just a few days after House Republicans voted to eliminate Food Stamps. The view from the top hasn't changed all that much.

Then there's the vitriolic "The Got No Shotgun Hydrahead Octopus Blues," which Baerwald was opinionated enough and felt so strongly for that he issued it as a single. Or the talking blues the drug war in "Nobody" or the fearful "AIDS and Armageddon."

The day she tried to kill me
She said you know You're gonna die
I said yeah but not yet.

The line in the song that says "I don't want to talk about it" could have cut two ways, in the Reagan years of denial or of the lover who worries that he may have contracted it, but was terrified of the sex that gave it to him. A thing that was all too real a feeling in the '90's. Which corresponds to the fact that the first thing up in the next song, where a recording of the introduction of the president, then leads into "The Postman," the album's gentlest song.

It's a moment of respite on a relentless CD. It's only at the end does Baerwald find some redemption for the ugly world he's just sang 9 songs about in "Born For Love." Make no mistake, however. "Triage" is as intense a singer's album as the 90's ever produced. Like I said earlier; what Baerwald felt with such vehemence then still sounds timely now.